MILWAUKEE, Wis. — Bryan Steil isn’t intimidated by talk of a blue wave. To the contrary, he finds the challenge “invigorating.”
“All the more reason to run,” he told me, just shy of three weeks into a campaign nobody knew would be necessary. That’s because Steil is competing in the Republican primary to fill the seat in Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District set to be vacated by House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis. Given his high profile among local Republicans, Steil, a manufacturing sector attorney and member of the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents, is considered the front-runner and likely nominee, so the race isn’t much of a competition— at least not yet.
And it’s not hard to see why people are eager to give him a chance. At 37, Steil is young, with an easy smile and uncontainable sense of excitement about the opportunity ahead of him. Huddled in the back of the Wisconsin GOP’s annual convention last Saturday, where his face seemed to be familiar to most of the crowd, Steil spoke with the Washington Examiner about the state of the race.
“We’re out working really, really hard,” he said. “You know, obviously other people started a long time ago. And that’s okay… We started this thing, I don’t know, three weeks ago [as of] tomorrow, is when we announced. And every day we’ve taken a step forward and made progress. We’re out there. I’m introducing myself to voters. I’ve never been an elected official before. And so, I’m just working hard to introduce myself.”
He’s not lying about that progress— Steil raised $250,000 in the first week of his campaign alone.
Now he wants to bring a taste of the state’s Republican leadership to Washington. “The reforms that were done in Wisconsin are a great example of what we need to get done in D.C. You look at the Wisconsin congressional delegation, it’s the types of people, the manner in which we interact — the way to get things done, I think is demonstrated through that. And so I look forward to kind of carrying that on,” Steil explained.
The former Ryan staffer, who comes from a prominent Janesville family, says he hears a lot of satisfaction with the policies implemented under Gov. Scott Walker and President Trump from voters. “When I talk to people, you know, they look at the reforms that have been done in Wisconsin. They look at the beginning of reforms that are getting done in Washington and they like the results. They like the unemployment rate, 2.9 percent in Wisconsin. They like the job opportunities they’re seeing. But they still think there’s frustration with Washington. There’s more to be done. As I’m having those conversations, people are saying, ‘Let’s take another step forward. Let’s not take a step back.’ I think that’s really the point, right?”
“The system of Washington is broken, but even the little bit of work that’s getting done, the positive results are being seen,” Steil contended. “And so people want to see more of that and so that’s really, really encouraging.”
Though his opponents will try to cast him as the second coming of the speaker, Steil says he’s learned a lot from other Badger State conservatives, like Sen. Ron Johnson. “I have a manufacturing background similar to Ron Johnson, so there’s a private sector experience of how you address problems head-on,” he noted.
“Anybody that walks into a factory — every day you’ve got to bring in raw material, you’ve got to manufacture it, you’ve got to get a good product out of the door, you’ve got to get it on time, under budget, every time, or you’re fired,” said Steil. “But if that’s the type of approach we had in Washington, we’d be in a much better place.”
When it comes to the seat’s current occupant, Steil believes “the number one thing you learn from somebody like [Ryan] is how to have a conversation about ideas … address problems head-on, and then present your solution.”
“More than anything,” he adds later on, “you really learn about how to interact with people.”
“Paul was always a happy warrior. And so he didn’t have to play to the lowest common denominator. He played to the highest common denominator of what makes us great, why we’re wonderful, why we’re the best country in the world to live in, and why we can fully unleash the strength of the American economy,” Steil insisted. “And so it’s that kind of excitement to step in that path.”
In a roundtable with reporters at the convention on Saturday, Ryan indicated he would wait until the filing deadline for the primary passes before offering an endorsement. Steil worked for Ryan in the early 2000s as a legislative aide and adviser, but works now as general counsel at packaging material manufacturer NEX Films.
When it comes to Donald Trump, who won the first congressional district by 10 percentage points in 2016, Steil thinks “the conservative reforms that the president’s pushing are the conservative reforms that everyone’s pushing.”
“What you’re hearing,” he maintained, “is just maybe a different approach as to how you communicate.”
“I have my own communication style. You know, everyone’s true to themselves. And so, you hear about it because people want to ask about it, but functionally, it’s the same conservative reforms that everybody else is pushing, it’s just different communication styles,” he told me.
Back to that blue wave. If Steil wins his August primary, as he’s likely to do, his opponent could well be Randy Bryce, the ironworker who built a high-profile campaign off a viral announcement video and a pledge to “repeal and replace” Ryan. Though Bryce is well-funded, his far-left politics will be a tough sell in southeastern Wisconsin, and he’s already turned out to be a less-than-perfect candidate for elected office.
Asked about Bryce, Steil, who says he’s been so focused on his own race that he hasn’t turned his attention to the Democratic primary field, replied, “I’ll let that play out when we get there.”
The district is probably more competitive than Ryan’s record of big wins might suggest, and if Bryce wins the primary, he’ll have access to a good amount of cash. Even if Bryce doesn’t prevail, the eventual nominee will benefit from the extra attention that comes inevitably with the race to replace Ryan. But Steil is unconvinced the blue wave will flip the seat from red to blue.
“You know, these people in D.C. don’t really have a full grasp of the ground in Wisconsin,” he said. “So sure, they’re going to try to intimidate us by phrases like ‘blue wave.’ I mean, they haven’t been right before. So, I don’t see why they’d be right this time. When I talk to people, I think they want to take a step forward.”
But Steil also sees the prospect of a competitive election as “part of the invigorating reason of getting in.”
“Sure, they’re going to challenge some of these reforms we’ve done, but the results are beginning to speak for themselves,” he said, betraying a laudable glass-half-full outlook on what could turn out to be a tough political climate. But given the district’s two decades of support for Ryan, and recent support for Trump and Johnson, Steil has good reason to be optimistic.
